Welcome to Head Scratcher Day here in the PostScript koi pond! Our text today will be E.J. Dionne Jr.’s column about the Romney campaign’s apparent efforts to muzzle Paul Ryan, in which Dionne wondered whether the Ryan budget plan might prove a problem for Republicans on down-ticket races. Mitt Romney is already trying to make the slash-and-burn Ryan budget go away, said Dionne.

Commenters, and PostScript herself, wonder what that means. It’s currently believed among those who type these things that Romney selected Ryan as a running mate because he has a whole lotta austerity-low-tax-ideas-Randian-numbers-wonkish cred with the base of the Republican Party, and Romney does not. (Already this week George F. Will wrote that the pick made him feel better about Romney.) But since Ryan debuted on the national ticket, as Dionne wrote today, both he and Romney have been walking away from Ryan’s signature rapid-weight-loss budget.

So Romney has found hisself an ideas man to make the fiscal hawks happy. Except that they’re not going to use his ideas! It’s like having fantastic abs but keeping a shirt on all the time, as reportedly Ryan also does. There’s a big ol’ disconnect right now about how to interpret the Ryan pick if they take the man without the plan.

Greg Sargent has an excellent post today in which he calls out Mitt Romney for being the “just trust me” candidate. Romney’s tax plan? Sure, it doesn’t add up, but he’ll fill in the details after you elect him. Romney’s spending cuts? Available just after you elect him. And then there’s the personal stuff, including his tax returns; we’re supposed to just trust him on that, too.

Greg focuses on the press’s role, but the real failure here is within the Republican Party — and the real losers from having a trust-me candidate are that candidate’s own party, too.

In a time in which America needs to meet the competing goals of greening its economy and ensuring a steady supply of affordable energy, which candidate has the right plan to power the economy? Neither.

Yet more evidence came this week as President Obama and Mitt Romney campaigned in the Midwest, both substituting shamelessness for substance.

In Iowa, Obama attacked Romney for wanting to eliminate a tax subsidy for wind farms. Wind generates about a fifth of Iowa’s electricity, and the resulting revenues have convinced even Rep. Steve King (R), perhaps the state’s most obnoxious conservative, to support continuing the billion-dollar-a-year federal handout , which is scheduled to lapse at the end of the year.

Except that the tax subsidy — known as the production tax credit or PTC — is an expensive policy with all the sophistication of a neanderthal. It gives wind operations a flat credit for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they produce — regardless of whether the grid needs it at any given moment or whether those operations have done anything to bring down costs. The consequence is a subsidy that demands no cost-saving innovation of the wind industry and fails to account for the real world of running a power grid. And Americans’ tax dollars and utility payments are paying for the excess costs.

The Family Research Council (FRC) is a loathsome organization. Sure, it bills itself as “the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power.” But let’s be clear. By family, FRC means households headed by married heterosexual couples. “President Obama's Administration has aggressively promoted a homosexual agenda and sought to equate the homosexual lifestyle with that of the natural family,” wrote Peter Sprigg in one of many postings under the issues section of the organization’s Web site. He went on to express concern about the “social implications of promoting a destructive homosexual example.” Last month, the FRC flogged a much-reviled and flawed study that claimed “children of homosexuals fare worse on most outcomes.” And the Southern Poverty Law Center says that FRC’s “real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians” through “false claims ... based on discredited research and junk science.”

But upon hearing the news of the shooting at the organization’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, my first thoughts went to the people who work there.Was anyone hurt or, worse, killed? Who did this? Why? Actually, it doesn’t matter why. For what was done was wrong.  

The idea of the Republican war on budgeting is pretty simple: For most Republicans, “deficit” simply means stuff they don’t like, and what the federal government spends doesn’t have anything to do with what the federal government raises.

What that means is that for any “war on budgeting” Republicans — which certainly includes Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — the actual budget deficit just doesn’t matter.

And today we saw what has to be one of the best examples of this that you’ll ever get. Apparently, the contradiction between running against Barack Obama over the Medicare cuts in the Affordable Care Act and simultaneously supporting those cuts in Ryan’s House Republican Budget finally got to be too obviously a fraud, and Ryan today flipped on it: He now opposes the cuts that he’s previously been supporting (while running against them).